Palliative care history: a ritual process

Abstract

At the beginning of the 19th century, the French anthropologist Arnold van Gennep described the rites of passage which accompany aspects of our daily lives. Each ritual, he argued, has three phases: separation, transition and incorporation. Their special features assist in the journey from one social state to another. More recently, these ideas have expanded to the analysis of social movements and provide a useful way of looking at the history of palliative care. They tell us something about the rituals and transformations accompanying the development of terminal and palliative care and give some indication about directions in the future.

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